SIAM UKIE National Student Chapter Conference – poster prizes for Birmingham PhD students!

The SIAM UKIE National Student Chapter Conference 2023 was a free two-day event that took place at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, on the 1st and 2nd June. It consisted of four plenary talks by industrial and academic applied mathematicians (one of whom was our very own Dr Alexandra Tzella!), 22 student contributed talks, a poster session, and a panel talk with some of the plenary speakers.

The aim of the conference was to provide a medium for industrial and applied mathematics communities to interact with one another. In particular, to enable graduate students and early career researchers to network with academics from different mathematic disciplines as well as find out about their career paths so far.

Prizes were awarded for the most outstanding student talks and posters. For their posters titled, ‘How does ECM stiffness affect collective cancer cell migration?‘ and ‘Translating the Three-Dimensional Mathematical Modelling of Plant Growth to Additive Manufacturing’, respectively, University of Birmingham students, Margherita Botticelli and Amy Tansell were awarded prizes for the best posters.

Margherita presented her PhD work focusing on studying the effects of the extracellular matrix's stiffness on collective cancer cell migration and tumour growth in 3D by building a mathematical model, starting from in vitro experimental data.

Amy presented her most recent findings in her PhD work which aims to derive a generalised mathematical model to simulate the extrusion-based bioprinting process via manipulation of the underlying physics of the system. Her work is motivated by the analogy between the growth of plants, via the expansion and multiplication of cells, and the point-by-point bonding of material underpinning fabrication in 3D printing.